Stop Motion Pioneers

William George Horner was a famous pioneer. He was a British Mathematician and published a mode of solving numerical equations of any degree now known as Horner’s degree. William Horner invented the Zoetrope in 1834 and he originally called it a Daedalum (wheel of the Devil). The Zoetrope was based on another pioneers invention which was Plateau's phenakistoscope. Horner's invention strangely became forgotten for nearly thirty years until 1867, when it became patented in England by M. Bradley, and in America by William F. Lincoln. Lincoln renamed the Daedalum, giving it the name of zoetrope, or wheel of life.

 The zoetrope uses the persistence of vision principle to create an illusion of motion. It works from a simple drum with an open top, supported on a central axis. A sequence of pictures on strips of paper are placed around the inner bottom of the drum. Slots are cut at equal distances around the outer surface of the drum, just above where the picture strips were positioned.

To create an illusion of motion, the drum is spun; the faster the rate of spin, the smoother the progression of images. A viewer can look through the wall of the zoetrope from any point around it, and see a rapid progression of images. Because of its design, more than one person could use the zoetrope at the same time.

Eadweard Muybridge was an English Photographer and working in photographic studies of motion and motion-picture projection. Muybridge moved to America as a Young man and lived in San Francisco. Muybridge started his career as a publisher’s agent and bookseller, but developed an interest in photography that seems to been boosted when he was recovering in England in 1860 after nearly being killed in a stagecoach crash. Muybridge quickly became famous for his landscape photographs, which showed the grandeur and expansiveness of the West.Eadweard Muybridge wanted to prove to Leland Stanford that a galloping horse cannot lift up all four feet clear off the ground during its stride. Muybridge decided to go to Stanford’s race track to attempt the experiment using one of Leland prize horses. Muybridge set up a series of cameras so that when the horse went round the track it would set off the cameras to take the picture. When they put all the pictures together it showed that all four legs were off the floor. In 1893, Muybridge lectures on the Science of Animal Locomotion and used his zoopraxiscope to show his moving pictures making this the very first commercial movie theatre.

The Zoopraxiscope is an early device for displaying motion pictures. People considered it as the first movie projector. The zoopraxiscope projected images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. The stop-motion images were initially painted onto the glass, as silhouettes. A second series of discs, made in 1892-94, used outline drawings printed onto the discs photographically, then coloured by hand. Some of the animated images are very complex, featuring multiple combinations of sequences of animal and human movement.




Joseph Plateau  was a Belgian Physicist (a scientist who is trained in physics). Plateau attended the University of Liege where he went on as a doctor of physical and mathematical scientist in 1829. He did research about the human eye and how it works. He focused on the retina because it lets the eye see colour. In 1832, Plateau and his sons introduced the Phenakistoscope which is a spindle viewer. It was also invented independently in the same year by Simon von Stampfer who called his invention a stroboscope. As a famous Pioneer, Plateau had inspirations from other inventor’s work from Michael Faraday and Peter Mark Roget. The invention consisted of two disks that spun in opposite directions from each other. At first it was a toy which was called the Faraday’s wheel until later he named it the Phenakistoscope.

The Phenakistoscope is uses the persistence of vision to create an illusion of motion. Although this theory had been recognized by the Greek mathematician Euclid, it wasn’t until 1829 that this principle became firmly established by Plateau. The Phenakistoscope used two discs mounted on the same axis. The first disc had slots around the edge, and the second had drawings of action, drawn around the disc in circles. Unlike Faraday’s wheel, whose pair of discs spun in opposite directions, a Phenakistoscope discs spun together in the same direction. When viewed in a mirror through the disc’s slots, the pictures on the second disc will appear to move.


The Lumiere Brothers Louis and Auguste Lumiere were pioneer contributors to the birth of film in 1895. The Lumiere bros were born in France but then moved in 1870 to Lyon. Both of them attended the largest technical school in Lyon La Martiniere. Their father, Claude-Antoine Lumiere (1840-1911), ran a photographic firm and both brothers worked for him: Louis as a physicist and Auguste as a Manager. It wasn’t until their father retired in 1892 that the brothers began to create moving pictures. The Lumiere Bros were not the only ones to claim the title of the first cinematographers. The first scientific chronophotography devices developed by Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey and Ottomar Anschutz in the 1880 were able to produce moving photographs, as was Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope premiered in 1891.The lumiere bros are well known by a lot of people for inventing the Cinematograph. The Lumieres held their first private screening of projected motion pictures in 1895. Thier first public screening of films at which admission was held on 28th December 1895, at the salon indien du Grand Cafe which is in Paris. This history-making presentation featured a short film, including their first film, sortie des Usines Lumiere a Lyon (Workers leaving the Lumier Factory).

A cinematograph is a film camera, which also is a film projector and developer and it was invented in the 1890’s.There are many arguments to find its real inventor. People say that the device was first invented as “Cinematographe” by French inventor Leon Bouly on 12^th February 1892. It is said, because theirs lack of money, Bouly was not able to pay the rent the following year, and the Lumiere bros engineers bought the license. Popular thought, however, Louis Lumiere was the first to convince the idea, and both Lumiere brothers shared the patent.

 

Thomas Alva Edison did a lot of things in his time including an inventor, scientist and a businessman who developed many devices that had a massive impact on life around the world. Edison invented the Phonograph, the motion picture camera and a long-lasting practical electric light bulb. As we know today, the light bulb is probably one of the most needed electronics of all time. He was also the inventor of the Kinetoscope. This device was used in stop motion animation.

The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture device, but not a movie projector. It was designed for films to be viewed individually through the window of a cabinet containing its components. This invention was the basic introduction that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before video. Watching it creates the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of film bearing images over a light source with a high speed shutter.

Charles- Emile Reynaud Charles- Emile Reynaud was a French science teacher and projected the first animated cartoon films. Reynaud died in a hospice on the banks of the Seine where he had been cared for since 29 March 1917. Reynaud is mostly known for creating a device called the Praxinoscope in 1877 and also created the Theatre Optique in December 1888, he presented this first animated film in public at the Musee Grevin in Paris. In his later years, his inventions were slowly going to an end as the cinematograph camera was being brought in by The Lumiere Brothers.

The Praxinoscope is very similar to the zoetrope (created by William Horner), it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The Praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its very narrow very slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in the positioned as the wheel was turned. A viewer would look in the mirrors and then therefore sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope.